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Fighting for your country's honour

Kristoffer "Hoffe" Bergqvist and the team at Danger Close worked with military units from around the world to ensure Medal of Honor: Warfighter's authenticity level is second to none.

The two soldiers move across the battlefield as one, a single military unit occupying two bodies. When one ducks behind cover under a hail of enemy fire, the other flanks and takes out the attacker. When one makes a break for a strategic control point, the other takes up a defensive position and keeps an eye out for trouble.

So effective is this duo that they dominate the battlefield, racking up more kills than any other team. As the timer expires, they turn to each other and celebrate their victory with a high five.

Kristoffer Bergqvist finishes his story with a grin. "And then one of them said, "Oh, my name is Michael, by the way.'" I am talking with Bergqvist, Creative Director of Multiplayer at game studio Danger Close, about Medal of Honor: Warfighter, the new military shooter that comes out this week.

One of the key features in Warfighter is the fire team mechanic, in which all participants in multiplayer are paired up with another squad member. Instead of a squad of ten individuals, each side will be made up of five two-man fire teams. While the entire side will have to work together to secure victory, fire teams will have a special bond.

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In the chaos of a battlefield, you will always be able to see where your fire team buddy is, and if you should die, you can always respawn directly onto him. Fire teams get other special benefits, too. For example, if you are killed, your partner can get a revenge kill on the enemy who got you, allowing you to respawn instantly instead of waiting for the usual countdown. The partners will also get special score bonuses for protecting each other, assisting each other with kills, and so on.

Bergqvist has been telling me stories about how the fire team feature has allowed immediate bonding between total strangers during demonstrations of the game. "Yeah, it's beautiful!" he says. "We're making instant friendships all over the world."

He explained that fire teams were introduced to the game as an organic way to encourage teamwork without enforcing it with too rigid a structure. "If you can get a team of ten guys all working together, that's great of course, but you don't get that a lot. We wanted to find a middle ground, between the games where everyone is on their own, and the squad kind of games. If you can rely on just one person, it's a more immediate payoff; it's easy to identify the ways in which you help each other. And of course it's easier to find one friend online, form a fire team, and go find a game."

As involving as the fire team mechanic is, Warfighter's primary draw is its inclusion of twelve so-called "tier one operators", elite special forces from a range of different countries. These include US Navy Seals, the Polish GROM, and the British SAS, plus some local boys. I jokingly tell Bergqvist how pleased I am that Australia's SASR made the cut, since they're the best.

"Of course!" he says, then adds with a laugh, "but really the Swedes are the best."

Bergqvist went on to explain where the idea came from. "We wanted a multiplayer mode that was about the soldiers," he explains, "so we sat down and talked to the different tier one operators that we have connections to, and they talked very highly about the other units they met when they were deployed - Polish GROM, Swedish SOG - and we thought, that's really cool. We want to get that in a game."

This led to a chain of contacts. After hearing GROM mentioned many times, the team at Danger Close talked directly to the Polish military elite, and they were enthusiastic. "They said 'Yes!" and they came to visit us, and it kept going like that until we had twelve. That's when we said, okay, enough is enough. Going from one unit in the previous game to twelve is plenty."

Each unit is then further broken down into classes, with every unit having a core rifleman unit, as well as more specialised units such as the snipers and demolition expert. Bergqvist explains that, even though you can technically unlock all 72 combinations of unit and class, it is much easier to get those that reflect the specialties of the real-world units.

"The first thing that happens when you start the game is that you choose your rifleman," he says. "They are the bread and butter of all special operation units out there. They're mid-range fighters, and they can do anything. So whether you pick the Swede or the Australian, that's what you'll start with."

"Then when you start getting access to new classes, they are tied to units. For instance, your first sniper will be Korean. It fits, because the Korean UDT Seals have the best sniper training in the world. The first point man you get will be Swedish, because it's really similar to the Swedish kind of training. Of course, this is a game, and we don't want to lock anyone in where they don't want to be, so if you want to be an Australian sniper, we will give you access to that, but you're going to have to fight for it. You earn XP, you rank up, and after a while you get access to it."

Many Aussie gamers will be eager to get into the boots of our elite SASR troops, so I had to ask what their specialised classes will be. "Obviously there's a rifleman," Bergqvist says, "but the featured class in the game for the SASR is the point man. He has a nice carbine for medium to long range combat, he's very, very fast, he has the flashbangs so he can do aggressive room entries, and access to UAVs." He smiles and adds, "The featured class for the Swedes is also point man, so I've been having a lot of fun playing that."

The less sense a class/unit combo makes in terms of real-world military training, the longer it will take to unlock. "For instance, a Swedish demolitions guy makes no sense. We have nothing like that in the Swedish special forces. You can still unlock it, but it's going to take you some 60 hours of gameplay. But yeah, in the end when you've unlocked everything, there's going to be six classes and twelve units, so 72 total soldiers to unlock."

However, this is only the beginning of the customisation available in Warfighter, as Berqvist explains. "All those 72 soldiers come with weapon parts, and we have a very advanced weapon customisation system in the game. This came out of our dedication to authenticity. When we had GROM visit, for instance, they showed us their M249 light machine gun. The Swedish units also have M249s, but they look different. So when you unlock the Swedish machine-gunner, you'll unlock all the parts needed to rebuild it into a Swedish one. It adds more parts to your M249 customisation pool, and then you can mix and match as you want."

These swappable parts take on many forms, allowing the same basic weapon chassis to carry iron sights versus a long range scope, shorter and longer barrels that have an effect on range, and accessories such as stocks and grips to assist with handling.

This consultation with many real-world military units led to some interesting discoveries, such as when a chance encounter with an animator revealed differences in how two units reload the same weapon. "We had the GROM guy working with the animator doing the reload animation for an HK416, and making sure the hands moved exactly right," he recalls. "A couple of weeks later we had a Navy Seal visiting, and he saw that reload and said, 'That's not how you reload a 416!' We said, uh, we're pretty sure it is, but you're a Navy Seal, so we don't want to argue with you."

"It turns out they're trained differently. So now, some of the guns will have different handling depending on what unit you are. It's a cosmetic change, but we included it to add authenticity and to add distinct flavour to each of the units in the game."

Finally, I have to ask Bergqvist about Warfighter's primary competition this holiday season, the unstoppable Call of Duty juggernaut. What does he feel differentiates his game and makes it the one to buy? "The fire team mechanic, and how unique that gameplay is. Also that we're the authentic modern day shooter, with the same gear that's being used out there by the guys today." He pauses, and then shrugs, "But I'm going to play both."

Medal of Honor: Warfighter arrives on Australian retail shelves this Thursday.

- James "DexX" Dominguez

DexX is on Twitter: @jamesjdominguez

8 comments so far

I've been proofreading documents for the last month or two, so forgive me for being pedantic, but paragraph 17 has a typo: "This game out of our dedication to authenticity."

On topic, this actually sounds like a fantastic idea. I think if you can reward casual teamplay, that's a great thing. It's tricky because personal scoring means each individual is ultimately acting selfishly, and making scores dependent on team performance leads to blaming the team for screwing up, but you really have to be a "team player" to rise above that rag-tag group of rambos that get torn apart by an organised group.

That said, it's out Thursday, and I've already earmarked X-Com, Hitman, Mark of the Ninja and Far Cry 3 as my purchases till Christmas/NY, with Borderlands 2 struggling to find a place. Even Battlefield 3 never got a look in, I might never get around to another online shooter.

Commenter

Lucid Fugue

Location

Melbourne

Date and time

October 23, 2012, 8:40AM

Ta, fixed.

Commenter

DexX

Location

MCDexX on XBL, PSN, Steam, and iOS Game Centre

Date and time

October 23, 2012, 10:51AM

Know this is not my gamestyle at all but it just sounds so awful.

Commenter

Charlie Miso

Location

Part of the Rebel Alliance and a traitor

Date and time

October 23, 2012, 9:09AM

Being a nintendo devotee I have never played a single war game, but this sounds really interesting. Dexx have you played this yet?

Commenter

TBomb

Location

Wiiiii!

Date and time

October 23, 2012, 9:59AM

Shooty shooty bang bang pew pew pew.

Personally I'm hanging out for Killshooter IV: The Bulletening.

In other news, how about that local sporting squadron?

Commenter

luverly_5pam

Location

getting to da choppa

Date and time

October 23, 2012, 10:42AM

Blech.

I love a good war game as much as the next chap, but in the hunt for realism there seems to be this growing glorification of and salivation over the real-world basis of CoD / MoH etc. It makes me very uneasy, and the whole marketing process for MoH has put me right offside. It should have balance or it should be anchored in fantasy, otherwise I'm not particularly inclined to look at it.

Commenter

Lith

Location

rapier999@hotmail.com

Date and time

October 23, 2012, 12:12PM

Sorry to fans of this genre but i have to agree with the others on here.

FPS online multiplayer makes me shudder; FPS squad based online multiplayer, convulsions; FPS Online multiplayers that make you level up to unlock classes/weapons, no thanks; increasing glorifcation of war and playing up to patriotic chest beating, get me the first ticket out of here.

The only good squad based shooter that comes to mind was Republic Commando.

Commenter

Knotpossible

Date and time

October 23, 2012, 3:23PM

I saw the demos and presentation on E2 and was most impressed. I'm not really one for FPS but to take the extra step to make every "type" unique and the little touches like hearing the actual back up crews chattering in the native language in the background as a nice touch.

Me and my friend did have some random lulz at the setting because it's oddly amusing seeing your country set up as a warzone/stage in a game =P